Real Life is taking a week off. In the meantime we’ve brought together a few of our recent articles on what we are calling “meme finance.” These articles address how social media dynamics have combined with speculative markets to raise the profile of new kinds of financial instruments, like NFTs and cryptocurrencies, as well as bring a new cultural emphasis on financial speculation as a form of entertainment. The result is a kind of literalization of the attention economy, in which memes are monetized (the “Charlie Bit My Finger” NFT, the “Leave Britney Alone” NFT) and would-be money itself is a meme (dogecoin). These phenomena can seem irrational, and are undeniably destructive, but they have become increasingly central to the internet’s interpenetration of everyday life.